4 ms·

As many others have said, I try to only downvote those not adding value to the discussion, or not following the guidelines. I have also (as I'm sure many people

by llimos 6y ago

As many others have said, I try to only downvote those not adding value to the discussion, or not following the guidelines. I have also (as I'm sure many people have) been the victim of downvotes simply from people disagreeing, which I think is not what downvotes are for. Which got me thinking. How about a system where we penalize downvotes that are on comments which also have several upvotes? If a comment is genuinely not adding value, or against the guidelines, one imagines it would not garner many upvotes. So if a comment gets upvotes as well, this probably indicates that the downvotes are for simple disagreement, and those downvoting should lose karma. I'm not sure what the ratio should be, or how much the penalty should be. In my mind equal numbers of up and down indicates that the downvotes are misplaced. So perhaps something like if upvotes = downvotes/3, or maybe some hard limit like 4 upvotes would trigger downvote penalization. Perhaps this would make people think twice before downvoting for disagreement. As an aside, on StackOverflow downvoting costs you 1 point. I don't think that's a good system because sometimes a downvote is warranted, but something like the above seems more fair.

notacoward 6y ago
Counterpoint: comments that are counterfactual or fallacious deserve to be downvoted. "Not adding value to the discussion" is far too broad, since it includes many other things that can be extremely subjective, so I think it's not useful as a guideline. > penalize downvotes that are on comments which also have several upvotes Seems like a version of automatic meta-moderation. I'm not strictly against the idea of modifying someone's "voting power" based on past voting behavior - frequent vs. infrequent, positive vs. negative, conformist (for lack of a better term) or contrary. However, such systems have to contend with the issue of reinforcing groupthink rather than actual quality, and the last thing HN needs is more groupthink. Also, any implementation is likely to involve the manipulation of values that aren't small integers, and apparently that's Too Hard.

by llimos 6y ago

notacoward 6y ago

Counterpoint: comments that are counterfactual or fallacious deserve to be downvoted. "Not adding value to the discussion" is far too broad, since it includes many other things that can be extremely subjective, so I think it's not useful as a guideline. > penalize downvotes that are on comments which also have several upvotes Seems like a version of automatic meta-moderation. I'm not strictly against the idea of modifying someone's "voting power" based on past voting behavior - frequent vs. infrequent, positive vs. negative, conformist (for lack of a better term) or contrary. However, such systems have to contend with the issue of reinforcing groupthink rather than actual quality, and the last thing HN needs is more groupthink. Also, any implementation is likely to involve the manipulation of values that aren't small integers, and apparently that's Too Hard.